Exploring The Effect Of Topic Familiarity On Chinese College English Major Students' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Reading

Studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition have attracted more and more foreign researchers'attention, whereas there were a lack of empirical studies within this field in China. According to Nagy, Herman, and Anderson's incidental vocabulary learning hypothesis and schema theory concerning background knowledge, an empirical study was designed to investigate the effect of topic familiarity on Chinese college English major students'incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading. The key research questions were put forward: (1) Can Chinese college English major students incidentally acquire English vocabulary through reading? (2) Does topic familiarity have any effects on their incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention through reading? (3) If the answer to the second question is positive, then what specific effects does the factor have?The study was conducted according to Pulido's study (2003). The subjects were 40 Chinese college English major sophomores. All subjects were required to read two expository passages, one is more familiar and the other is less familiar to them, which have already been confirmed by the relevant topic familiarity questionnaire. And each reading passage contained the same quantity of nonsense target words. After reading, the subjects were asked to complete two kinds of vocabulary tests—translation production vocabulary test (task 1) and translation recognition vocabulary test (task 2). One month later, a repeated measure was conducted.All data were collected and put into the SPSS 11.5 statistical software package for the quantitative analysis. The results show that the effect of topic familiarity is not significant on their incidental vocabulary acquisition and retention in task 1. But in task 2, the effect of topic familiarity is positively significant on their incidental vocabulary acquisition. The finding indicates that Chinese college English major students consult their background knowledge in order to infer the encountered new words'meaning. That provides empirical support for schema-theoretic view of learning. In addition, implications for future vocabulary teaching and learning are discussed.